Bringing up the end

A highly specific, defiantly incomplete conversation with Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman has opinions—lots of them. In his writing, which has appeared in numerous publications and 10 best-selling books (including the seminal manifesto “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs”), the cultural critic often muses on sports, music, television, technology, the future, and random pop ephemera through colorful analogies that are unapologetically subjective and tangential. Tulsans will have a chance to see him speak in person on June 21 at First Street Flea, where he’ll be discussing his latest collection, “X.” 

JOSHUA KLINE: In your new book, “X,” you compile past essays you’ve written on topics in 21st century pop culture and re-contextualize them for now. In revisiting your writing, do you ever find yourself disagreeing with your past opinion, or thinking you missed the mark?

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: You know, I think that when I look back at some of my earlier books I will sometimes have the reaction that I was misguided in the argument that I was making, because I was a much different person in my late 20s. These were all written in the past 10 years, a lot of them were written in the past five years, so it doesn’t seem as if they are representing something that I can no longer relate to. I think I’m probably changing at a slower rate than I used to, as all people do. Obviously, from when you’re born to when you’re 10, you become a totally different creature. Ten to 20, you change. Twenty to 30, still a big change, but it’s slowing down. Thirty to 40, you’re kind of the person you are.

Also, I should say, the book is called “Ten,” actually. This is my own fault. I overlooked the popularity of Roman numerals in society. Everyone’s calling it “Ex” (laughs). It’s kind of crazy to me, it’s almost as if I expect people to keep track of how many fucking books I’ve written. Like, that’s a weird thing. How would anybody know it’s “Ten”? We should have put “Ten” on the side of the book, like, actually in words, like in letters. But, we didn’t, so that’s life. You can call it “Ex,” I guess. “X” isn’t the worst thing to be. “X” has a lot of different meanings—could be, like, how you spell your name if you’re illiterate. Could be a mathematical element.

KLINE: When I first saw the title I immediately thought you had written the definitive history of X, the band.

KLOSTERMAN: (Laughs) Well, that probably would have been more interesting.

KLINE: What you mentioned a minute ago—as you get older, you slow down until you’re kind of set in who you are. As someone who consumes, observes, and criticizes pop culture so voraciously, how do you reconcile settling into yourself with the constant evolution of the culture?

KLOSTERMAN: First thing I would say is I don’t feel like I am or ever have been plugged into the culture. It almost seems like the culture is plugged into me. It almost seems like that’s how the world works now—It’s just an onslaught of this information constantly. I mean, there was a time in my life when I would’ve thought that if I get to middle age and I have kids it was gonna be hard to write about the popular culture because I won’t know what’s going on. But I feel like I know too much of what’s happening.

The idea of staying in touch with the way the world is moving is almost hopeless now, so it’s something I don’t have to worry about. Also, I do have a huge luxury just because of the good fortune I’ve had and the way my career has unspooled and the way the world has worked out, I don’t have to be the first person to write about anything—I get to be the last person. And that is great. Instead of being seen as a person who’s supposed to break information, I’m the person who’s supposed to explain the information after the fact. And that’s much easier—for me, at least.

In the ‘90s, when I worked in newspapers, [breaking information] was sort of the job. Especially, this is pre-internet—that’s what I did. And then when I got to Spin, like 2002, 2003—and I was writing for Esquire, ESPN as well—it seemed at that point, the principal thing I was doing was sort of mainstreaming the counterculture. Me and the people I worked with were essentially looking at things on the fringes, finding the best aspects of it, or the things that had the most potential, and sort of shifting them over into the mainstream consciousness. And now I’m kind of at the end of that, where something becomes popular, sort of has this experience in the world, and then I kind of look at it retroactively.

KLINE: It’s become a truism that 2016 was just a terrible year in every respect for everybody. In politics and culture especially, we had that mess of an election and a barrage of deaths of seemingly every important artist and musician. From your point of view, how bad, really, was 2016?

KLOSTERMAN: Well, ya know, it was a bad year if your existence is intertwined with the culture that’s outside of your own life. I mean, if your whole life, if your happiness and your enrichment comes from, ya know, celebrities you’ve never met and sort of political abstractions that you experience through your television, it was an awful year. But you know for me, like, my daughter was born, I had a book come out, and it was a better book than the ones I’d written before, I had a real good time in 2016. But that’s—I view my life in a much smaller way. Mainly because I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, or whatever, it almost seems to me like I’m writing about popular culture without being intimately involved with it. There was a time when I was younger when I guess it seemed like I was, but I think that was sort of my own construction. I think I believed that I was involved with it because I wanted it to be meaningful to me, and I thought the way for it to be meaningful is to inject myself into the middle of it. But in truth, it’s meaningful whether I’m involved or not. It’s meaningful because it matters to other people. So that’s sort of how I look at it now.

KLINE: What are you engaged with right now in the popular culture? What do you find especially exciting or interesting?

KLOSTERMAN: Well, one thing is that I like the fact that streaming services like Spotify are allowing me to move backwards in time with music in a way that previously would have been prohibitively expensive. I always liked classic rock and music from the 60s. But I couldn’t own every album from that time. It would make no sense for me to go out and buy seven records by bands who are popular because they’re only OK. But now I can sort of sample all of that, so I’m able to move backwards through time. I’m kind moving in now almost to the pre-rock era, like rock music from the pre-Beatles and the 50s and stuff. I don’t know if I would have been able to do that in a previous time.

I’m pretty much engaged with television like a lot of people because it’s simply so much better now than it used to be. Maybe the idea of this second golden age of television—it might be coming to the end, but the result is that even the average shows now are pretty good. There are shows on television now that I don’t watch at all, but if they’d existed in 1996 would have been universally seen as the best program happening.

KLINE: Have you had a chance to watch the new “Twin Peaks” yet?

KLOSTERMAN: That just came out and I’m on tour, so the hotels all have HBO, they don’t have Showtime. But I’m judging it, I’m looking at it from the way people seem to be talking about it on social media, and my sense is they don’t seem disappointed. You know, that’s the kind of thing that you almost anticipate people being upset about, and it doesn’t seem like that is happening, it seems like the response is positive. Is it pretty good?

KLINE: I was skeptical going in—I was trying to keep my expectations at bay, and I was pleasantly surprised. Lynch and Frost have made something that’s for the hardcore fans, but I think it’s going to really alienate the casual fans and people who sort of remember it from two decades ago but haven’t really engaged with Lynch’s larger body of work since then. It’s just completely off-the-rails batshit crazy.

KLOSTERMAN: Well, you know, there really aren’t a lot of casual “Twin Peaks” fans. There are, I guess, some, but that show was never that popular even when it was getting tons of attention, even when people were writing about what an interesting thing it was at the time it was occurring, the average consumer still wasn’t really watching it. So, if that’s the move they’re making then they’ve made a smart move. Because, sure there are going to be some people who are going to be like, “I wanna check this out just because I saw people talking about it,” you know? But even the fact that it’s on Showtime, the expectation of how good something on Showtime will be is slightly less than HBO, at least in terms of how the average consumer views it. So it’s probably in a good position. I was surprised that it’s not a Netflix show, that seems like a very Netflix move. I’ll definitely watch it when I get home.

KLINE: Considering the acceleration of information and diminishing attention spans, plus the fragmentation of art, music and film across so many platforms—do you think meaningful art within the popular culture will continue to become more marginalized?

KLOSTERMAN: It will be difficult in film. The way film is sort of being changed by this acceleration is that you either make a movie for less than $40,000 dollars or you make a movie for $40 million about superheroes. And that middle path where a film like “The Godfather” fits, an expensive movie that isn’t a blockbuster, it’s going to be hard for that movie to be made. But it seems as though its equivalent could be created somewhere else. I mean possibly in television—it’s possible that in ten years from now it will widely be perceived that television is superior to film. I know some people argue that now, but I still think that there’s this underlying belief that the greatest artists, P.T. Anderson or whoever, are still working in film. Maybe that won’t happen and you’ll be able to do it on television.

The thing about this acceleration and the diminishing attention spans and all these things that are all intertwined—they are not happening independent of each other, they’re happening because of each other. The thing that does seem to occur is that for every new generation, it does feel normal. When we talk about the acceleration of culture—I mean, people talked about that in the ‘70s. When you think about that, that’s insane.

There’s a book that I often reference called “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” which came out in like 1981 or 1979. Basically, this guy who was in advertising had this mental breakdown and decided that he needed to write a book about why television needs to be eliminated and he was like—it wasn’t ironic or symbolic—he was like “We should destroy every television.” That was at a time when there were three networks and PBS, that was it. And that already seemed like this oppressive problem. Now it seems like if we went back to that suddenly, if something happened to the world and suddenly we only had four TV channels, it almost seems like we would have unlimited free time, and that life would be in a way weirdly easier.

So, these things you’re talking about, they are definitely happening, but they only impact the people who remember the previous iteration. And as a consequence, I think valuable art will still be made—that’ll still happen—because for every new generation it won’t seem like we’re in a crazy scenario, it’ll seem like this is just how life is.

KLINE: But at what point does that sort of rewire our brains in a detrimental way?

KLOSTERMAN: Well, that’s a more difficult question. Okay, so, how long have humans existed? Let’s take a random timeframe, let’s say it’s 25,000 years. Let’s say human life essentially began in Africa 25,000 years ago. Well, that means that for basically 24,900 years, if a person saw something moving in front of his or her eyes, it meant he was in front of it for real. So, if you saw a tiger in the grass, that meant there was a tiger there. There was no way a tiger could be moving in front of you, unless you were next to a tiger. Well, then the advent of film happens in the early 20th century, then we had television, then we had the internet. Now it’s totally normal for us to see things in front of us that aren’t there. In fact, I’ve seen a tiger hundreds and hundreds of times in my life, and only a handful have been when I was looking at a real animal. So, that alone is probably the most dramatic jump, much more dramatic than the internet or anything else. This idea that biologically for thousands of years we were designed to consciously realize that seeing something meant it was there. And now we can intellectually tell the difference—we know that if we’re watching “Game of Thrones,” that that’s not real. And that if you turn and look at your wife on the couch, she is real. Intellectually, we understand that. But biologically do we understand that? Does our body understand that? I don’t know, that’s a pretty big evolutionary leap over a short window of time.

Sometimes I do think that the vague alienation people feel with technology, with the internet, sort of with their reliance on looking at screens—I wonder if that is our body reacting against the fact that this is unnatural and that our optic nerves are still telling us that the things we’re seeing are real even though in our mind we know they’re not.

KLINE: Does that worry you at all?

KLOSTERMAN: Well, it worries me in the sense that—might we be doing something unnatural to ourselves? But we’re constantly doing that. Our life is constantly filled with unnatural things. I was just across the street at this place and, like, I drank a bunch of Dr. Pepper. Well, that’s obviously an unnatural thing to be drinking. There’s no aspect outside of the water in it and maybe the sugar—everything else in there, I don’t even know what the fuck it is. But I would never choose not to do that. I would never choose not to have that in my life.

Sometimes, I think the world would be better if we eliminated the internet. However, I would never eliminate it for just me. I would never say, like, everyone else can have the internet, and I just won’t, ya know? These are things that I want, these are unnatural things that I desire. I don’t think I could go back now. I just don’t think I could. I was at the airport this morning, I was flying from Atlanta to Nashville, and my plane is delayed 40 minutes or whatever. And I basically spent 40 minutes looking at my phone. Now, it wasn’t that long ago in my life when I would have read, or maybe just sat there and daydreamed or whatever. I wouldn’t have missed looking at my phone because I didn’t have one that did all these different things. But, if my phone was out of power I would have been bummed for those 40 minutes. I would not have been happy about it. I wouldn’t have thought to myself, well now I can be a natural human or whatever.

So, I don’t know, I think this stuff—it only worries me when I have a conversation like this. I don’t think about it that much, unless I’m writing about the future or talking about it in an interview.

It’s part of my job to think about these things—I just realize that because I write about these things, it maybe creates the illusion that I spend my whole life occupied with this problem. I suppose I do think about this problem way more than the average person, but it’s still a negligible part of my life.

And I will say that having kids does shift this a little bit because the kid is really actually living in the moment and doesn’t have sort of—my son, he gets distracted by things, but he gets distracted by things that just happen to interest him more in the moment; nothing’s making that happen. I think that’s probably one of the benefits to having children—however briefly, you are more engaged with the real world. But, of course, as he gets older and my daughter gets older, they’re going get phones and be fucking crazier than I am about it and it’s going to be worse, so it’s kind of a draw.

KLINE: How do you think about that as a parent?

KLOSTERMAN: There are two answers. The first answer is it makes me extremely nervous, and makes me extremely worried, and my natural reaction is to always stop them from doing it, to limit the amount of time they have with screens or phones or television.

Then the other part of me thinks this sometimes: I think of my parents’ relationship with technology, and then my relationship with technology. Technology is probably easily 25 times more important to my life than it was to my parents’. So, it stands to reason that for my kids, technology will 25 times more important for them than it is to me, so am I actually stopping them from being successful if I keep them from completely immersing themselves in technology? That is going to be the world they inherit and live in. Is it to my advantage to almost amplify the amount of experience they have with computers? I don’t know.

Like, it would have been to my benefit if when I was five I would have had access to a computer. We didn’t have a computer in our house. I didn’t really use a computer in any meaningful way, outside of playing a game like Oregon Trail or something, or playing on television or Atari, until I was a junior in college. Maybe it would have been better—there are things on my computer that I still can’t figure out, and sometimes a person five years younger than me can. Now, is that because they’re smarter than me? Or because they have five more years of dealing with computers? I don’t know.

KLINE: In “But What If We’re Wrong?” (2016), your thesis is that there are fundamental truths that we take for granted today that may be disproven in the future. You wrote this before the Trump machine was in full force and before “fake news” and “alternative facts” were hashtags. How have you processed this new fact-challenged paradigm?

KLOSTERMAN: That book, as it turns out, would have been much better for me if I’d published it a year later (laughs). I wrote that book still under the premise of “There’s no way Trump’s going to win.” It didn’t seem remotely possible while I was writing that book. But this whole thing about fake news, it’s really the logical extension of something that happened in the ‘90s. When Fox News came out and was followed by MSNBC, there was just this collective realization that something people had been worried about in journalism was true. Which is that people do not want objective truth in journalism. It’s not that they don’t necessarily trust it; they don’t want it. What they want is news that supports their pre-existing biases. They sort of convince themselves that, well, objectivity is impossible because we’re not robots, so as a consequence we shouldn’t have objectivity at all, which is not really the way journalism should work.

The idea of a journalist, in my view, is to recognize what your biases are and then compensate for them and constantly be conscious of them while you’re writing or broadcasting or whatever you’re doing. But they went the opposite way. Now, the belief is that people want news that they already believe, so it’s not surprising that the next step to this is people just fabricating news that serves that purpose. The goal with media now is rarely to elucidate things that people don’t already know, it is to galvanize the things that they think that they do.

You know, it’s like if somebody decides that they’re going to only use facts, but they have a very clear agenda, in other words it’s like they want to either take down Trump or prop Trump up. Either way, let’s say that they go into it with that position: “This is the conclusion I want people to draw.” Well, they may say they’re only going to use real information and that’s fine, but then they’re going to exclude information that doesn’t fit their narrative, they’re going to shape the information that they do have, what’s ultimately going to happen is that the real news will be almost as fake as things that were just made up entirely. So I guess I’m not surprised that this happened.

I think the reason there’s fake news now is because 25 years ago people decided that they didn’t want news.

KLINE: Do you think there’s any hope that this will naturally correct itself, that there’ll be a pendulum swing back to recognizing objective truth?

KLOSTERMAN: That’s an interesting question. Would the pendulum swing back? I don’t foresee that happening. But even though I don’t see the pendulum swinging back in the direction of objectivity, I do see the possibility for some kind of self-correction, which would be that over time people will just consume news differently, and they will build in the possibility that what they’re reading is fake as they read it. I could see that happening, because people are pretty good about normalizing situations. They can just maybe figure out a way to triangulate what you believe, what the news is telling you, and what might be closer to the truth. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to read so many news sources at the same time that the composite of all that fake news will somehow level off into this middle channel that would be reality. Although I gotta say, as I’m saying this out loud it seems terrible. But who knows? 

For more from Joshua, read his article on local podcasts From a Basement in Tulsa and Opinions Like A-Holes.